The Motive that Dares not Speak its Name
Over on the First Things website (yes, I regularly peek surreptitiously), Richard Neuhaus has some reflections on a new book by Austin Dacey, The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life.
Neuhaus’s take:
Here is Dacey’s thesis: “Secularists have the moral high ground, if they will only claim it, and in so doing break the religious monopoly on the language of ethics and values. . . . Secular liberalism is in disarray. Abroad, the confrontation with Islamic totalitarianism shakes the complacency of the open society. At home, liberals are soul searching. This book attempts to show how they can reclaim the language of meaning, morality, and values in the culture wars at home and in the struggle for toleration abroad. They must remove the gag order on ethics, values, and religion in public debate; hold religious claims accountable to public criticism; rediscover the secular moral conscience; and advance a moral case for their values of personal autonomy, equality, toleration, self-criticism, and well-being.”
On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step.
I have not read the book and, full disclosure, I had never even heard of the author before. I would be interested in any other takes on either the book or its author. But a book that begins with a poem by Czeslaw Milosz has already captured my attention:
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it . . .
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good . . .
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit,
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
I will take Austin Dacey and Fr. Neuhaus’s word that such people as these students exist, but I have never met anyone remotely like them. Even in everyday discussions with friends and co-workers about what in the world is happening on Lost or Jericho, or whether to support striking workers, or what to do about health insurance, the people I know don’t shrink from making moral arguments or condemning the Nazis! Everyone I know who discusses abortion, stem-cell research, or same-sex marriage argues explicitly in moral terms no matter which side they are on.
I have a colleague who, when beginning a course on ethics with the statement that one of its purposes was to help in the formation of moral judgments, was met with the impassioned protest: “We’re not supposed to make moral judgments!”
It seems to me that secular liberals are indeed searching for a ground for their de facto moral judgments about, say Nazis killing Jews and researchers kiling stem cells. I also think that Alasdair MacIntyre’s historical study “After Virtue” establishes very clearly that the assumptions of the original liberal position are present in both Naziism and some of the contemporary systems — namely that only one’s feelings ground morality. At least the late and controversial Richard Rorty was willing to admit that fact explicitly, which made him persona non grata to many in the secular philosophic establishment
I am very tired of bishops and theologians telling us that we live in an age of moral nihilism and invoking Nazi analogies for the modern democratic secular State. We live in a highly moral age, thanks to the UN Declaration of Human Rights and all its stands for. The fanaticism of John Paul II about abortion and civil unions is put in perspective when we look at the Netherlands — higher birth rate than Catholic Spain, Italy, Austria and Poland but the lowest abortion rate in the world — thanks to proper sex education and contraceptive education. Congratulations are in order to Jose Zapatero, who is leading Europeans to a moral and humane future.
Rorty was a sophist, and cannot be taken as representing mainstream ethical thinking today, any more than Feyerabend can be taken as representing the thinking of scientists or philosophers of science.